Kicking. Squealing.
Timothy Egan has an Opinionator column at The New York Times titled The Great Gun Debate. The general argument is the same (that a country with more guns will have more homicides by gun), but it’s filled with factual and interpretive errors. A passage at the end of the piece was most curious:
Going into a theater or a mall in America can be a risky thing, as recent mass shootings have shown. I just returned from Idaho, where people are buying guns at a record clip because of the delusional fear that President Obama is going to take them away. The safest place in Idaho, by far, is just inside the security line at the Boise airport, where a big sign warns people that they will soon be entering a mandatory gun-free zone.
Yet Idaho has one of the lowest homicide rates of any state. At 1.5 murders per 100,000 people, Idaho actually is about as safe as the TSA side of the security line at the Boise airport. According to the Wall Street Journal’s interactive data which is a compilation of FBI data, there were 339 murders in the state between 2000 and 2010. Of these, 188 involved a gun. Idaho has a population of about 1.6 million. This is a strange example for Egan to use to make his point. He could have chosen Louisiana or Alabama to help make the case.
I love how gun owners are delusional because they think the government wants to take away their guns while he arguing that the government should tale away their guns.
I guess it is unfair to expect journalists to construct intelligent arguments.
What are the stats on Idaho’s per-capita gun ownership? What is the percentage of black and Mestizo residents?
You would need to control for race, gun laws, and the actual number of guns in the defined geographical area of homicides committed to have the full picture. I’m pretty sure that this would reveal that race is by far the most important factor in homicide rate. But most gun rights advocates won’t say that. Still possession of firearms in homes or on persons has a measurable deterrent effect.
“In New York City, one of the nation’s safest large cities, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black during the first six months of 2008, according to victims and witnesses, though blacks make up only 24 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic perps, and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. The face of violent crime in cities is almost exclusively black or brown.” – Heather MacDonald, “Nation of Cowards?” City Journal, 19 Feb 2009
Blaming the NRA or “gun culture” for the criminal behaviour of non-whites is a long-standing practice at the Times. Remember the DC sniper? The NY Times span that shooting as the product of the “one shot one kill” competition marksmanship subculture, whose sinister gentile practitioners gather at meets to put holes in targets with four-figure custom rifles.
When the perpetrators turned out to be a demented black Muslim and his acolyte, enabled by an incompetent black police chief, the Times suddenly became very quiet and the whole affair vanished into the memory hole.
It’s interesting that they don’t even feel the need to find a hypothetical white perpetrator anymore.
The fearful Egan had better steer clear of frightening Finland:
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/
We should make guns illegal, then no one will have them.
It’s worked so well for drugs.
Y’know, I’d actually like more law-abiding blacks and Hispanics to own be able to own guns legally. They’re stuck in cities where the crime rate is high, and polic increasingly don’t have the manpower to tamp down on all-out tribal warfare. But NYC, DC, Chicago, etc. all have fantastically draconian gun control laws.
The city-dwellers who don’t buy cheap, used Glocks illegally don’t have access to a means to defend themselves against anyone who might come knocking for protection money, etc. They just get to watch helplessly as their neighborhoods are riddled with bullets sprayed out by thuglets whose marksmanship approximates a blind quadriplegic. It’s not like loosening carry permit requirements can make the situation any worse.
This is another example of great Cathedral propaganda. No editor worth their salt for objective, factual reporting would allow the piece to carry the silly half truths or odd juxtapositions. Why should the article discuss mass shootings at malls, then switch right to Idaho gun owners. The common reader’s brain would infer that there must also have been mass shootings even in Idaho.
Maine’s another good example of guns not being a problem despite high gun ownership. 247 murders in 10 years and only 117 from firearms. The police killed 15 of those 247, and most likely 15 of the 117 from firearms. Very low murder rate.
There are parts of Chicago that are more dangerous than Kabul. I wonder what kind of folk live in those areas of the Windy City?
Not errors, deliberate propaganda techniques
It’s worth checking out some obscure songs from Pink Floyd’s 1988 album “A Momentary Lapse of Reason, such as On the Turning Away. It was Floyd’s first album after their breakup with Roger Waters.
I was in high school when the album came out, and have just a bit earlier become interested in the band’s music, as it pre-dated me by a decade. A skater dude on my wrestling team played The Wall in his car, and I was enamored of it. As a teenager from then on, I thought their lyrics were “deep”, as in they held encoded secrets of philosophy and life. LOL.
When “Momentary Lapse of Reason” was released, I read some review, which noted that the album’s music was really good, but the lyrics were pedestrian, banal, or whatever the word was. I sharply disagreed. The music (at the time) seemed very murky and dull, no hooks and no catchy rhythms. Except Learning to Fly, which had that cool whamy bar thingie going on. Anyway, I thought lyrics in Lapse of Reason were very deep.
In particular with the song “On the Turning Away.” Listening to it now, I see how the song’s lyrics foreshadowed the soon-to-hit-us Political Correctness explosion, along wiht turbocharging of immigration. Other songs a few years later, in particular The Scorpions “Winds of Change” cheered the end of the Cold War and the subsequent Population replacement of the peoples of the West. After all, the recording industry suits were well embedded in the butthex matrix. The musicians played the tunes they called.
Anyway, peak PC came and went. 1988 America does not even exist, except as a whisp of memory. “On The Turning Away” as a hymn of charity through self-annihilation, is quaint at this point. Nobody really believes in charity aymore.
But yeah, the music was indeed brilliant. I came to admire David Gilmour as the best guitar composer in history. Hell of a player too.
By the way, I saw them on the 1988 tour. It was my first concert.
Why is the security area at the airport so safe? Are wagging fingers or disapproving frowns the only tools used by TSA to enforce the “gun free zone”?
Hmm?
@PO ++++ on Pink Floyd. I first got turned on to them around 1980 during senior year in High School when “The Wall” came out. I sort of forgot about them after the early ’80s until two years ago when I had to give a eulogy at a memorial service for a loved one. I quoted “Wish You Were Here” at length. That song chokes me up every time.
The inability to consider racial differences in the prevalence of various dysfunctions is one of the greatest mindkillers. With regard to many social ills (teen birth rates, gun murders, murders in general, poverty), the black-white dysfunction rate differential is so enormous that it makes other considerations almost irrelevant.
For example, some very simple but convincing studies (introduce safe-sex education into some areas but not others, compare changes) have shown that safe-sex ed has a small but existent positive impact on teen birth rates. But of course the white teen birth rate is ~20/1000, while the black teen birth rate is ~120/1000, which makes safe-sex ed look like it’s barely worthy of an afterthought. (And this does not even take into account the higher black teen abortion rate.) As Chuck has pointed out, the discussion you can have about teen birth rates is pretty damn stupid if you don’t take racial demographics into account. The discussion about gun murders is similar when you live in a country in which the black murder rate is ~10x the white (Hispanic + non-Hispanic, the FBI doesn’t release dis-aggregated data) murder rate.
Now, the black poverty rate is only (only, lol) 2.81x the non-Hispanic white poverty rate, but that doesn’t stop Democrats from laughing at states like Mississippi and Alabama for receiving a great amount of government assistance yet still voting red…
E.Rekshun, musically their 1994 album Division Bell is quite good. Yeah, “Wish You were Here” is one of the best songs ever recorded. Pearl Jam’s “Black” and Mother Love Bone’s “Stargazer” (especially once youget to the bridge) have a similar effect on me.
Idaho should hold a wolf hunt in Mr. Egan’s honor.
From the 2001 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey (found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/guns/ownership.html): 55.3% of Idahoans admitted to owning a gun. I am sure the number is much higher since people in Idaho tend to be a little wary of giving out info on firearms ownership. That comes to about 900,000 people who own firearms in Idaho as of the 2010 census (assuming, of course, that children own firearms too – in Idaho many do).
Scary. In 2010 there were 22 murders. 12 were committed using firearms. Number of firearms-related murders per 100,000 gun owners was 1.33, roughly the same as the overall murder rate. When I lived in Idaho most of the violence was Mexican on Mexican, mostly migrant workers without women, and young men in gangs. Even then it was safe enough for women to walk around by themselves.
Just for fun: The WaPo listed that only 3.8% (or about 23,000 out of 600,000) of D.C. resident confessed to owning a firearm, but in 2010 there were 100 firearms-related murders. That means the murder rate among D.C. gun owners MUST be about 435 per 100,000! If we want to end D.C.’s crime problem we’ve gotta arrest all the gun owners! We are the 96.2%!
I do know that Idaho also has one of the highest numbers of gun shops per capita in the country. I can think of a good 7-8 in my town of 60,000, and that doesn’t include the number of garage FFL’s who specialize in online transfers.
I’ve sugested to liberal friends that they consider firearms in the same frame as abortions: if you don’t want one, don’t get one.
I do know that Idaho also has one of the highest numbers of gun shops per capita in the country. I can think of a good 7-8 in my town of 60,000, and that doesn’t include the number of garage FFL’s who specialize in online transfers.
Idaho looks like a good destination for a refugee from the People’s Republic of California!
I just looked through the NYT comments section, and, as usual, all the top comments and NYT picks utterly fail to address any of the issues you do. I mean, the thought itself (Idaho, what are the stats) is absent. It’s like when Douthat or Brooks write a column with Sailerish undertones, most of the commenters don’t really understand what he’s saying; it’s all bark.
Related- Egan has long asserted the NRA ‘silences’ anyone who dare cross them, and people like Bob Costas are ‘brave’ for broaching the issue. In reality, ‘silence’ means ‘fail to adopt completely and unquestioningly my wrong-headed argument’, and ‘brave’ means ‘saying something 99% of the media agrees with’ or ‘Sandra Fluke’. Someone should come up with a list of words and their new meanings. ‘Curvy’ definitely needs to be in there too.
“Going into a theater or a mall in America can be a risky thing, as recent mass shootings have shown. ”
Yes, of course the 10s of thousands of malls and theaters in America are nothing but slaughter houses and of the 100 million people who pass through Americas shopping centers, malls and theaters each month the number of corpses piled up due to gun crimes reminds us all of the Nazi death camps.
So this timid White dork starts with an irrational false claim and them gets his big girl panties in a knot trying to persuade the reader that guns are a threat to one and all.
Post modern, fact free journalistic hysterics. As usual.